Greetings fine friends of the pitch,

We've got some great news for the weekend: we sent the final Pitch Deck art files to our printer this afternoon! Box, rulebook, cards, funding tiles: everything is 100% DONE.

Apologies again for running a little bit late. We honestly could have shipped a really good game a few months ago, but the extra effort we put into the cardset, art, and rules really paid off in the end. It's part of the reason we've kept quiet around these parts – we've been heads-down cranking on the game every minute we can.

I think we've made something fun and weird and special that you're going to want to play with everybody you know.

So what's next? We're working with our printer, Ad Magic (you may have heard of them – they produce Cards Against Humanity, Exploding Kittens, etc.), to get everything looking tip top IRL. Then once the prototype is approved, Pitch Deck goes into full production, all the copies are loaded onto a cargo ship in China, it lands in Los Angeles after a week or two, and are shipped to a fulfillment center to be mailed. We'd estimate August as the ship date. It breaks our heart that we can't get you the game faster (I know we estimated June as our delivery date, etc.) but we know you'll agree when you get your copy that the extra polish has been totally worth it.

We're trying to keep a lot of the art and everything as a surprise for when you get it in your hands, so I don't want to spoil too much. But one of the things we're most proud of is an INSANE wraparound illustration for the box interior. Here's a tiny piece:

We'll be in touch over the next month or two with more as we have some physical samples to approve and other surprises planned for you. 

Have a great weekend everybody!

Fred + Alex

Hello everybody, but especially you the person reading this right now,

Some great news: we're close to submitting the art files to our printer! It took a teensy bit longer than expected, mostly because we ended up adding *way* more art and design than we initially planned.

Jakob just finished doing the final batch of drip icons, and they are INCREDIBLE. Can you guess any of the non-obvious ones? I'm looking at you, Column 3 Row 2.

The in-game currency is also almost done! We're probably going to add a bit of color detail here, but Simon is 100% done with the illo work for them. Here's the front and back for our in-game fictional VC firms, Thirst Capital:

They're…they're just so perfect. 

So yeah, all good news! The final design process is wrapping up and we're still on track to ship the game to you in June-July, subject to the unknowable vicissitudes of cargo ships sailing across the Pacific Ocean.

Oh and one last thing! I'm wrapping up a Kickstarter for this other game I make called Monikers. It's another ridiculous party game, where you get your friends to guess the name on a card. If you're into Pitch Deck, you'll probably get a kick out of this one as well.

 

Anyway, check it out if that sounds interesting! I've been making the game for a few years now, and each set just gets better and better and better.

I think that's it for now? Unless anything crazy happens, the next update will probably be when we have a production prototype of the game. Which is always equal parts thrilling and terrifying when you realize the thing you've been working on for so long actually exists in real life now. I feel like people don't talk enough about that moment, so you'll definitely get our reactions once we have that in hand.

Alex.

A little over 30 days ago, Alex and I clicked launch on this project from my house in San Francisco. 

We had been working on the project since the fall of 2015, and it was finally time to push our baby into the world. 

A couple pledges trickled in as we waited nervously and wondered whether we'd both have to suffer the humiliation of another failed Kickstarter (both mine and Alex's most recent projects didn't hit their goal). 

I had recently moved to San Francisco and started my job at Y Combinator, and Alex had quit his job in 2016 to work on games full time. Many sleepless nights and difficult conversations went into refining the design and preparing to launch. In the days before launching we had made the hard but correct decision to rename the game from Thanks for Coming In! to Pitch Deck based on candid feedback from a play test. Every little decision suddenly felt filled with huge amounts of risk. 

We had also told ourselves we just shouldn't do it if we couldn't get 1,000 people to commit to a copy.

But as we saw people whose names we didn't recognize start rolling in, we quickly realized we were probably going to be in good shape. A day later the project had hit its goal of $20,000. Now, thanks to your backing of our humble game, we've achieved triple that amount – over $60,000 raised from almost 2,000 people. 

Thank you for believing in us.

We couldn't be more inspired by your enthusiasm to play our game, and we are going to be working incredibly hard over the next couple months to make sure you have the highest quality experience in your hands by the summer. We've got a couple other announcements planned until then, but for now, we'll just leave you with a link to our pre-order page to send to your jealous friends who missed out on our campaign:

http://pitchdeck.business

We can't wait for you to play Pitch Deck, and thanks again for all your generous support,

<3 

Fred & Alex

Hello hey hi,

Only two days left! So yeah, now's the time if you want to share the project with friends, need extra copies, or have any special requests for us. 

Also cmon people, no takers on the $5K or $10K pledge levels? We're getting down to the wire here—who's the hero that can warm intro us to Blue Apron's CMO? Casper? MeUndies?

But for real, Fred and I just wanted to say thanks one more time to everyone for making this project waaaaaay more successful than we ever imagined it would be. Now that we're approaching 2000 backers, we've been able to do some WILD stuff with the design of the game. Better components, more art, everything. I *desperately* want to gush about all the little details we're putting into it, but it'll be so much more fun to just experience them in person.

Though as a tiny preview, we've been working with Simon on Pitch Deck's profoundly weird in-game "currency" this week. Here's a draft of one:

So so so good.

Alex.

Hi all!

Fred and I started writing an update with Pitch Deck's origin story, and it immediately turned into a crazy sprawling mess. So we decided to split it up into a series of Medium posts. Which honestly felt like a very on brand thing to do anyway.

Here's the first one about how to make a party game that's inclusive and fun and not stressful. Notably, it features this insane matrix of games:

 

We'll have more of these for you over the course of the Kickstarter.

What else? We hit the minimum # of backers we need to print the game with the exact spec we were hoping for! So we don't even need to do stretch goals. Which we're super happy about. 

(I mean, if you love stretch goals, let's say there was one and it was for $40,000 and it was for the Awesome edition of the game. Hooray, we did it everyone! Awesome edition is a go!)

But yeah, we ARE building something really cool that we'll need your help with. More on that next week hopefully!

Alex.